Muni will cut light-rail delays by 10 percent, director pledges

The Muni T line arrives at the 4th and King intersection on Wednesday, October 3, 2018 in San Francisco, Calif. while a car takes a left-hand turn in front of the rail. The T line is known for the major issues that riders face including overcrowding, delays and the risk of car collisions because of left-hand turns.

Photo: Brian Feulner / Special to The Chronicle

Muni’s acting chief laid out a plan Tuesday to reduce subway delays during peak hours and cut down the number of meltdowns that bring whole areas of San Francisco to a grinding halt.

In the next three months, the light-rail system will cut delays by 10 percent, said Julie Kirschbaum, acting director of transit at the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency. She also aims to lower the number of times that riders are marooned for 20-minute stretches — or longer — to four per month.

Kirschbaum presented her “micro-dive” into subway improvement to the Board of Directors on Tuesday. The plan also called for swifter train turnarounds at Embarcadero Station, among other things.

For a bus light-rail system that’s limping along on old equipment and trying to negotiate complex city streets, that’s ambitious. Muni already had three major delays in February: An N-Judah car broke down and had to be towed on Feb. 4; a switch failed near Castro Station on Feb. 5; and a computer crash shut off the train control system, temporarily stopping all trains, on Feb. 14.

Making the light rail run smoothly requires a complex “symphony of things,” Kirschbaum told The Chronicle. It also calls for tradeoffs. After board Chair Malcolm Heinicke scolded Muni officials for the failed switch at Castro Street and Duboce Avenue, the agency’s director, Ed Reiskin, offered to put two workers at the site during peak hours. But that means taking them away from the outer parts of the city.

Even so, Kirschbaum said the agency needs to act quickly to fix its heart, especially now that frustrated riders can turn to private ride-hail services.

“If we can’t get those big delays down, people will start to look for other ways to travel,” she said at the meeting.

So Kirschbaum is tackling big problems first. Among them: the bottleneck at the busy intersection of Ulloa Street and West Portal Avenue outside West Portal Station. For years, riders of the K-Ingleside, L- Taraval and M-Oceanview Muni Metro trains have gotten stranded there, waiting for cars and trucks to pass. Now, Muni assigns two parking control officers to direct traffic at the intersection during rush hour. Kirschbaum said delays have gone down by 40 percent.

Rachel Swan covers transportation for The Chronicle. She joined the paper in 2015 and has also reported on politics in Oakland and San Francisco.

Previously, Rachel held staff positions at the SF Weekly and the East Bay Express, where she covered technology, law and the arts. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in rhetoric from the University of California, Berkeley.